ALSO SHOWING
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (PG)
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Taking a sideways glance at American children’s entertainer Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) via the fictionalised story of a troubled magazine journalist (Mathew Rhys) sent to interview him, this trusts that the latter’s inevitable redemption will be a useful way into Rogers’ story. As uninspired as that sounds, director Marielle Heller
(Can You Ever Forgive Me?) works hard to find subtle ways to mine drama from the tension between Rhys’s character’s professional cynicism and the seemingly saintly way Rogers conducts his life. Can he possibly be for real? Heller pulls at this thread with real delicacy and with Hanks (Oscar-nominated for best supporting actor) she’s able to capitalise on her star’s own national treasure status to carefully examine the complexities and struggles involved in being a genuinely nice guy.
The Lighthouse (18)
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Filmmaker Robert Eggers makes good on the promise of his unexpected 2015 box-office hit The
Witch with this thoroughly out-there follow-up. It’s a deranged tale of madness, malevolence and mermaidthemed masturbation, set in the isolated confines of a lighthouse off the coast of 1890s Maine, and featuring committed performances from Willem Dafoe as the titular structure’s flatulent, unhinged, secret-bearing keeper, and Robert Pattinson as his latest underling, a man of far fewer words but no more in charge of his own faculties. Eggers establishes his protagonists’ tenuous grip on reality in the opening scenes by having them stare down the lens of the camera as if daring us to keep watching – and he sets the off-kilter tone with the industrial foghorn blast of a ship, a motif that functions as a near-constant harbinger of doom and, quite possibly, a manifestation of what’s going on in the heads of both men. No other living human beings feature in this monochrome world, but there are appearances from severed heads, ghostly apparitions, barnacle-encrusted sea creatures and a fishy siren that fuels the fantasies of Pattinson’s drifter, providing onanistic relief from his more violent altercations with the island’s seabird population. This is a film steeped in folkloric tradition; it’s also steeped in the salty linguistic constructions and myth-making of Herman Melville, the latter manifesting itself in the breakdown of Dafoe and Pattinson’s toxic relationship as the younger man’s fascination with the lighthouse lamp that Dafoe’s character worships intensifies their mutual wariness and paranoia. Quite how seriously we’re supposed to take all this is up for debate; like Jack Nicholson’s Grand Guignol performance in The
Shining and much of David Lynch’s wilfully surreal horror inflections, there’s a dark strain of humour running throughout. The good news is that Eggers has absolute control over it. The end result is horrific and hilarious — and all the better for it.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
(15)
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Thirty years in the making (and unmaking), Terry Gilliam’s passion project is as over-the-top and messy as its tortured production history suggested. Adam Driver takes the lead as Toby, a disillusioned commercials director who goes on a strange meta-journey into his past when he reconnects with the Spanish cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he once cast in a short film inspired by Cervantes’ ground-breaking novel. Discovering the experience has caused this man to believe he’s the real Quixote, Toby gradually finds himself slipping into the role of Quixote’s sidekick, Sancho Panza, with the ensuing adventure re-awakening his own lust for life. The end result is fun and frustrating in almost equal measure. ■